Email a friend

To

From

Thank you

Sorry

Hacking Team, a firm best known for helping governments spy on their citizens, has been hacked. Here's a curated look at the documents, contracts, and code discovered by researchers sorting the data online.

Specializing in surveillance technology, Hacking Team has gotten a lesson in how it feels to have outsiders monitoring their affairs, all while privacy advocates enjoy a bit of schadenfreude at their expense.

The following slides are a curated collection of documents and various technical elements that researchers and journalists have uncovered as the 400GB cache of data taken from Hacking Team is sorted. Included here are contracts, code examples, emails, and other items that offer an inside look at a company that has turned espoinage into a business venture.

The message shown here was sent shortly after the Hacking Team account on Twitter was compromised. The attacker behind the incident is believed to be the same person that compromised another lawful interception company, Gamma International.

An email from a person linked to several domains allegedly tied to the Meles Zenawi Foundation (MZF), Ethiopia's Prime Minister until his death in 2012, was published as part of the cache of files taken from Hacking Team.

This is his email to the company thanking them for their help in getting to a high value target. His email address was used to register several MZF domains, all of them using similar themes, suggesting a Phishing campain of sorts.

This is a copy of the contract with Ethiopia, valued at $1,000,000 Birr (ETB). The contract is for Hacking Team's Remote Control System, professional services, and communications equipment. It's also possible the funds listed are in Euro.

The second of two slides. This is a list of Hacking Team customers with maintenance agreements. Here you can see who is active and who isn't. Note that Sudan and Russia are not officially supported - but they're clients.

Hacking Team's Christian Pozzi was personally exposed by the incident, as the security engineer's password store from Firefox was published as part of the massive data dump.

He took to twitter and issued denials, and when those didn't work, he warned that the 400GB download contained viruses. Considering his company developed custom malware, it's a sure bet that the download does have viruses, as well as the source code to modify them.